Little Russian Tales

At the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century, the name of Claudia Vladimirovna Lukashevich (1859–1931) was known to practically all residents of Russia. She was the only children's writer who competed in popularity with Lydia Charaskaya, and she significantly surpassed her rival in productivity, and, according to Nikolai Chekhov, published twice as much as she should have. By 1908, the circulation of her works exceeded one and a half million copies. Claudia Vladimirovna wrote exclusively for children (however, in 1914 and 1918, she published two volumes of memoirs). Her pen produced stories, novellas, fairy tales, plays for children's and school theaters, biographies of famous people, she compiled collections for reading, collections for family and school holidays, dedicated to the anniversaries of writers, historical events, she compiled readers and so on. Claudia Vladimirovna was a regular contributor to many children's magazines of that time - "Children's Reading," "Young Reader," "Toy," "Family Evenings," "Sprouts," "Spring," "Heartfelt Word," as well as "Stock Exchange News" and others. Her books "ABC-Sower and First Reading for School and Family" and collections of stories "Barefoot Team," "Grains," "Little Russian Tales," "Tales for the Very Young Children," autobiographical novellas "My Dear Childhood" and "Living a Life is Not Crossing a Field" enjoyed immense popularity; some of the writer's most famous works became the stories "Birdwoman Agafya" and "Aksyutka-Nurse."
In addition to her writing activities, Claudia Vladimirovna was a practical teacher, a member of the "Russian Women's Mutual-Benefit Society," and during World War I, she financed a ward for the wounded in the L. N. Tolstoy Hospital and organized a shelter for the children of front-line soldiers. In September 1906, Lukashevich became the godmother of the great composer and pianist Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich and took an active part in his life. In Soviet times, the popularity of Claudia Vladimirovna practically faded away; her works were deemed inconsistent with the spirit of the times; it was believed that she idealized the tsarist way of life, and that her works were imbued with excessive romanticism and sentimentalism.